I’m training as a coach. I start tomorrow.
I’ll be sharing the journey in a regular blog. This is my first post.
My intentions in writing are to be transparent, to be seen, to be honest, and to be in service of the emerging world in some way.
I’ve chosen coaching as the first formal frame for a lifelong helping practice. Not psychotherapy. Not neurology. Not bodywork. Not spiritual teaching. Not meditation.
I’m a little stunned. I have questions and reservations about coaching as a practice. What’s the difference between coaching and counselling? Is there room for failure and negative experience in coaching? How does coaching support the development of wholeness?
I have questions about myself as a coach. How do I coach others when my own character is so flawed, my own life so imperfect, my own struggles so profound? Can I coach people beyond some of the limits of my own experience and success in life? Do I need to be someone that clients want to emulate?
There’s also an ‘icky’ factor for me.
It’s difficult to separate the practice of coaching from its icky marketing. High-pressure sales tactics, cult-of-personality. A lot of coach marketing seems to attack the same part of the brain as gambling or pyramid schemes. It’s hard to imagine a deepened quality of life emerging from practice that begins in that frame.
I’m suspicious about coaching models and programs which hold up a heroic version of the coach and their insights, and then more or less overtly invite clients to seek a ‘missing something’ in themselves.
Clients are encouraged to idolise their coaches — “if only I could be more like them”. It’s a heroic mentality. And by extension, people want to become the hero of their own life. It’s a magnetic narrative, and helps galvanise attention (and spend!). But becoming the hero of your own life is not necessarily synonymous with success, or happiness. So does it really help clients?
I became the hero of my own life. At the time I thought it was awesome. But it came at a huge cost. I got lost. It hurt me, and hurt the people I cared for. In many ways I’m still recovering from it. When you over-identify with the hero, it’s too easy to lose sight of the other archetypes alive within. Where the servant? Where the hermit? Where the lost child? What happens when we lose touch with these parts of ourselves? Is there a way to access the power of the hero archetype to move towards wholeness?
We’re in a culture that fetishises the heroic archetype and its underpinning narratives. Our attendant lack of humility is bound up in our exploitation of the world as a resource, to the point of mass blindness, mass extinctions. So a coaching that emphasises heroic dynamics seems constellated around the same hyper-masculine, object-oriented, adversarial and atomising models we need to move away from.
Yet I’m here, about to begin as a coach!
Me and coaching. How the hell will we ever get along?! Somehow it feels right. It feels like a challenge. Like an excitingly uneasy fit. Like there’s tension that could speak to great possibility.
I’m determined to bring my wholeness, integrity and capacity to coaching. I’m hoping to participate in a field that connects with transformative and transitional practices from all over the planet, from different disciplines, to do with consciousness, and social change, and indigenous knowing, and trauma-informed practice, and decentralised patterns of resource and deliberation, and the evolution of being. I’m excited at what will be created out of that field.
As a new coach, I’m interested in some key things:
Listening
As a species, as a culture, we’ve been very focused on what we can see. But a new journey begins with listening. New experiences with ancient forms of knowing beckon.
Honesty
How can I bring my full perceptual awareness to service of a client’s being? How can I support a field that in turn supports the highest and best honesty with clients, and from them?
Intuition
How can I offer my most subtle insights and knowing in the coaching process? How can that offering catalyse and integrate with the client’s intuition?
Sovereignty
What is sovereignty? Why do I feel like it can change everything? It’s a wonderfully slippery and connected concept. Maybe definable as an uncompromised experience of our difference and wholeness in relation to others, held paradoxically by a simultaneous experience of interbeing.
Power
I’m interested in power. Which is kind of taboo. Our patriarchal culture is sick with power. And so we minimise and deny power, but never escape the shadow of that sickness. Can full acceptance of my own power in coaching interact with the power of a client to create new experiences of power?
Ordinariness
I’m interested in questioning ‘success’, in looking beyond externally-oriented definitions. I’m interested in coaching towards kinds of ordinariness.
Struggle
I’m also interested in struggle, in the pressures of being, in the forces in our psyche that forge our character, our relationships, our love. What small nudges can shift the patterns of struggle into patterns of flow?
Transformation
Of course I’m interested in transformation. How is it different than change, or transition? Is it wider? More intentional? Is it collaborative? Is it something we can recognise? Design?
Story
I’m interested in story. Its power to create us. The way it structures the experience of time for us. But I’m suspicious of the unconscious patterns we adopt when we use story. What ways can we use story more consciously to break from ego and suffering?
Language
How can we find new (and possibly ancient) ways to experience language? The mind-body split that structures Western experience positions language in mind. But what have we lost? And what can we gain by embodying our language?
Creativity
Is creativity a characteristic? An experience? A pattern bigger than any one of us? What can we do to embody and enjoy it? Can we weave it through more of our lives than we thought possible?
Service
In a world that’s grown beyond mono-narratives of religiosity, and exploded into an ecstatic plurality, what’s our possibility for service as a rich and abiding source of ‘right action’?
Freedom
What does it mean to be free? What does it feel like? Is there an experience of freedom beyond the individualistic frame we’ve come to see through? How does freedom feel, and how do we find it when lost?
Embodiment
I’m interested in embodiment. What’s our somatic birthright, and have we misplaced it? As our neurology and society evolve, how do we embody the possibilities we’re waking up to?
Gender
I’m interested in how gender shapes our experience and relationship. In maleness, in the patterns of embodiment and power that patriarchy writes upon us. I’m interested in allyhood across all genders and compassionate, fearless enquiry.
Time
I’m interested in time, and its cousin space. What’s happening in our experience of time? What freedoms are just beyond reach in how we conceive of and experience time? Does our experience enable and constellate our atomised, separate sense of self?
Trauma
I see trauma as a pattern written into us at cellular and social levels, psychologically and epigenetically. I love possibilities in healing trauma, things like reparenting ourselves, and neural plasticity.
There’s some things I’m not really interested in.
I’m not interested in leadership. I’m not interested in winning. Maybe I’ll rekindle an interest in leadership one day — plenty of people I respect have found ways to reconceive leadership, but to me it’s just too tainted by its resonances through patriarchy, ego, unconsciousness and ‘power over’ dynamics.
My starting points for becoming a coach — all the nuanced aliveness I’ve described above — have been hard-earned and integral to my sense of life, and meaning. They’re ideas and interests woven through and from my own experience of life. In this sense my ‘back story’ is important to me, and may emerge somehow in future posts.
For now I want to focus on what coaching might mean for clients.
They’ll be paying for a special relationship. So the quality of the relationship is where the value is created, experienced. However they hope to benefit from the coaching experience, everything flows from the relationship.
In my next post, I’ll go further into the way I’ll be offering relationship.
I start the training tomorrow morning.
Wish me luck.
